I picked up a pair of "toy" video walkie talkies with front and rear cameras for $20. I absolutely cannot believe the quality of the video (full motion, virtually no lag) and the range (300 meters outside? More? Not at all bad inside either) and the audio is completely acceptable. I had read that some of these units recorded each utterance push-to-talk and then sent it over complete to the other unit -- but these are sending audio on the push-to-talk in real time with almost no delay. Units pair to each other, apparently using 2.4 Ghz (encrypted?), presumably ad hoc network. $20 for a pair. This is nuts.
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By the way, the units are one blue and one pink. The blue one shows the signal strength with whitish bars, the pink one shows it with blue bars. They didn't miss a trick. They warn against charging (usb-c) while using it, presumably to avoid messing with the battery. Of course, modifications are always possible ...
I am seeing units for as low as $9.99 a pair on Amazon US.
Avoid using while charging probably has more to do with the USB/charging circuit producing horrendous interference.
Adequate filtering is hard to do on a $20 price point.
I doubt the transmissions are encrypted.
@SpaceLifeForm Depends on the chip. If these use the same chip as the one in the units shown by Big Clive a few days ago (not exactly the same units, but odds are good the "SoC" is the same), setting up an ad hoc network would likely have the crypto just "there" without additional work. These pair with each other and I don't know how difficult it would be to confuse them. I'll probably have another pair in my hands shortly and will try test before they vanish.
If it encrypted, I would suspect the secret key is just the XOR of the two MAC addresses. Good performance.
@SpaceLifeForm Assuming they actually use a different MAC address per unit (you know what I mean!), this would be pretty much "good enough" for this application I suspect.
@SpaceLifeForm Just looked at the detailed specs on the chip. Yeah, I haven't opened these up, but odds are its the same, and that one chip is pretty much the whole ball game.
@lauren Chinese product?
@briansullivan One assumes the Pope is Catholic
@lauren I have a number of Chinese electronic products (phones, smart watch, dashcam) that were dirt cheap and extremely high quality. One of the ways they cut costs is that there is no post sales support of any kind.
